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Yale man charged with embezzling nearly $60,000

Stillwater NewsPress (OK)

Sept. 13--A Yale man who served as an insurance agent in Cushing has been charged with embezzling $59,113 in more than a seven-year span from multiple Payne County residents, including the town of Ripley.

Mark Paul Lauderdale, 65, faces up to 10 years in prison and a maximum $10,000 fine on each of two felony embezzlement charges. Lauderdale received a cease and desist order in September 2017 after investigators with the Oklahoma Insurance Department discovered the alleged crimes and began seeking other victims. Fourteen victims were listed as endorsed witnesses in the information filed by the Payne County District Attorney's Office.

According to the filed affidavit, the investigation began in April 2017 when the Insurance Department received a written complaint from a representative of the Ingalls Activity Club -- a nonprofit -- that it had been paying Lauderdale "regular premium payments" for the organization since 2010, but had recently come to discover Lauderdale canceled the insurance policy in 2013, the same year his Oklahoma insurance producer license expired.

The investigation included a search warrant served at Lauderdale's office, in which files dating back to 2013 and receipt books were seized. The affidavit reads that Lauderdale always provided the Ingalls non-profit with a receipt of payment on the insurance premium. He reportedly told an investigator he had been "taking money from the Ingalls Activity Center and the town of Ripley for the purpose of purchasing insurance policies. Lauderdale admitted that he had spent the money and did not provide an insurance policy for either entity," and later went to investigators and provided a handwritten list of names from which he allegedly said he had fraudulently been taking money from.

Lauderdale reportedly told investigators he spent their money on personal expenses and "he wanted to cooperate with the investigation and pay back each person he took money from."